A review by colinlusk
Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution by Laurie Penny

3.0

The fightiness of this is its best aspect. I like the unapologetic demand to not be constrained by societal expectations, and the anger that women are still so often victims. It's pretty broad-brush on its portrayal of what men are like (awful in every way, even contradictory ways sometimes) and what women are like (an unstoppable force that will one day overthrow capitalism and bring about universal love and understanding), and a lot of what she thinks are societal stereotypes seem old fashioned even to me and I'm quite a bit older than her... but its a polemic not a piece of scholarship so that can be excused too.
I was less keen on the egotism of it: constantly wanting to drop in references to her own fantastically bohemian lifestyle, how she could easily attract any man if only she weren't so damn clever... That sort of stuff is all a bit tedious, but hey...

What really struck me, though, was how dated a lot of the language is. Although she's showing early signs of her current twitter persona, there are loads of sections in here that, if you took them out of context and tweeted them you'd get piled on: repeated use of the word "transexual" instead of "transgender", references to men and women as being defined by their anatomy, girls deliberately stifling their own puberty as being somehow non-ideal, even approvingly quoting Helen Lewis... And on and on. There's tons of stuff in here that was probably pretty cutting edge in 2014 but are only believed in now by middle aged feminists without blue hair. I'm here for it, actually. I look at it with a sort of rosy nostalgia for when things were less fucked than they are now.